Here is our 2nd episode of the Two Ladies in the Kingdom podcast. We had our first episode on the subject of “gym hopping” last month and today our theme is what to do if you get stuck with a trainer you don’t work well with at a Thai gym. You can listen or download the podcast above, watch the video of it at top, or download/subscribe two our podcast on itunes. Our podcast covers the female Muay Thai scene in Thailand, a little about what’s happening with us in training and fighting, and a topic of the month.

What’s in Podcast Number 2?

We’re still trying to find our footing, as podcasting is new to both of us, but I think we did a better job of putting names and events into context this time around. And, we’re still learning, so any suggestions are welcome; additionally, suggested themes, topics and questions are appreciated as well.

It happens that Emma and I were both fighting in a few hours after the recording, at different events and in different areas of Thailand, so we talk a bit about that. She’ll be facing a good opponent in Krataitong Por. Promin at an annual Muay Thai event held at a university south of Bangkok (this is Emma’s third year fighting at this event), and I’m rematching Faa Chiang Rai Sor. Sakunthong for our fifth match together, here in Pattaya and then in three days I’ll be facing her again for a Northern Title Belt up in her hometown of Chiang Rai, about 13 hours drive to the North. Weird, eh? Not sure why she at the last minute decided to challenge me here at home a few days before our title match, but I’m rolling with it. The morning after the fight I’ll be getting in the car for the long drive North.

Next we go over some of what’s been going on in female Muay Thai here in Thailand:

Jasmine Whybird (AUS) faced Saifaa T. Teerasawad (TH) at an IFMA event for Muaythai Day on February 6th, 2016. Jasmine took home the UN Trophy in the campaign to End Violence Against Women and Girls. In the podcast I totally forgot that I’d seen highlights from this fight (it’s been a busy month, my mind is gone), which I posted to my page and you can see in this highlight reel of WMC Muaythai Day

We also mention the Santai Festival up in the north of Thailand in San Kamphaeng, as well as Santai’s Canadian fighter Sophia “Cocopuff” Torkos fighting 3 times in 6 days. Unfortunately, they don’t give any information about who she fought in that middle fight, but here’s a photo of her victory and you can see the female referee we mention later, Harneen Ibraheem, raising her hand.

Sophia faced Hongthong Liangprasert at the Santai Festival, the 118 lbs Northern Muay Siam champion; then this middle fight; and then fought Saifaa (mentioned above, also 118 lbs WPMF World Champion), which you can see in this video of the fight by the gym.

Here’s a photo of Hongthong from two years ago (red top), when she faced France’s elite fighter Anissa Mekson (blue top) for a WPMF title:

In the Main Event of the Santai Festival, Greece’s Fani Peloumpi defeated Thailand’s Nong Em Wor. Santai for a 20,000 Baht prize. You can see photos from the entire event in this album from Santai’s Page.

Here’s Nong Em and Fani just before their fight:

Sadly, we didn’t get to this story, but Kelly Creegan’s former opponent Faasithong has run out of opponents and went against the rules of the Muay Thai authority and fought against a man at a festival in Isaan. The side bet was 260,000 Baht (that’s huge) and I do believe she won.

Here’s that fight:

We talked about Mary Verona Farm (TH) defeating Witney Tobin (AUS) fighting out of Kiatpontip Gym in Koh Samui. You can watch the fourth round of that fight to get an idea.

We discuss the The Star vs Mod Daeng fight which happened a few days ago down in Koh Lanta, which was available streaming, here’s a rough copy of it below if you would like to see it, it’s a fight Emma and I both enjoyed and The Star is a former WPMF Interim World Champion and opponent of mine (though at a lower weight class), and Mod Daeng is a long time fighter out of Phuket I believe:

Also veteran female fighter Ashley Nichols from Canada has moved to Thailand and will be training and fighting out of Kaewsamrit Gym in Bangkok for what she hopes is a year, I believe. She wrote a “GoFundMe” campaign to help with the finances and emphasizes the importance of representing her First Nation heritage, which is very cool. She arrived in Bangkok on February 23rd.

Kunlun had a big fight promotion in Pattaya in February and France’s Laurene De Oliveira (fighting out of Phuket) faced Belarus Ekaterina “Barbie” Vandaryeva (fighting out of Banchamek Gym in Bangkok), with Barbie executing a great fight plan and Laurene fighting to last bell:

Getting Stuck with One Trainer

The theme of this episode is about getting stuck with the same trainer at your gym. This can be great – I have one trainer and honestly want to pout when I have to go with someone else because he’s sick or something – or it can be really irritating, if you feel that your trainer isn’t the best for you. It’s a difficult thing to deal with, especially as women, because a lot of us don’t like to step on toes, voice our displeasure, or ask for what we want. It’s also difficult because Thai gyms are run by very strong hierarchies, and often times the low number of women and the social dynamics can mean that some of the trainers can become a bit possessive over the female students. This can be benign, but it can also be a huge problem.

So, we talk about the difference between making a fuss if you’re a short-term student at a gym (some people only come for a short stay and possibly offending people has an expiration date), versus being a long-term presence at the gym and having to deal with shifting dynamics. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: don’t be afraid to rock the boat if you have a limited time at a gym and aren’t getting the most out of your padholder; but be tactful in addressing the problem because the hierarchies are important and have been there longer than you have and will be there after you leave. When you first get to a gym, try to sample around a little bit because when you’re new you can get away with it easier. If you’re already stuck with a trainer and want to change, or if you’ve sampled around and decided who you like best, try using private sessions to secure the working relationship.

We also answer listener questions about female referees, how my invitation to other ladies to come train with me has been going, and a little about teaching Muay Thai (which we don’t know a lot about, but we gave it a shot). If you’d like to continue the conversation on anything we covered please start a thread on our Roundtable forum which Emma and I moderate. And if you have questions you’d like us to cover in our next podcast send them our way.

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A 103 lb. (46 kg) female Muay Thai fighter. Originally I trained under Kumron Vaitayanon (Master K) and Kaensak sor. Ploenjit in New Jersey. I then moved to Thailand to train and fight full time in April of 2012, devoting myself to fighting 100 Thai fights, as well as blogging full time. Having surpassed 100 fights in 3 years here, my new goal is to fight an impossible 200 times in Thailand, as much as I possibly can, and to continue to write my experience.

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above, my how to video for warm water massage for shins [update: for longer lasting shin swells you can try this] Subscribe to 8limb.us articles for free here Anyone who has kicked anything knows that the occasional bump, knot or “mouse” on the shin or foot is inevitable. You can get them on your forehead or face from an elbow or punch and on your shins or feet from kicking knees, elbows, heads, etc. They kind of feel like badges of awesomeness, but they can also keep you from training and that feels lame. I always have something that hurts,

(above) my video introduction the common fight fears of gassing out and shin pain, the video below shows Den talking about what to do for fight conditioning Some Tough Talk One of the advantages of training non-stop in Thailand for so long is a sense of perspective I’ve gained on people who come with Muay Thai dreams. I’ve met maybe 100 people over the past year and a half who have come through the gym with serious aspirations to fight. They arrive very enthused, but less than a quarter of them actually do fight and none of them – not

A few months ago I wrote post titled Game Day: Why You Should Fight Muay Thai in Thailand. This is a follow up or “part two” to that post on the subject of how you know when you’re ready to fight, in Thailand or otherwise. When Are You Ready? Not long ago a fellow who I met through my Facebook page and who made it out to Thailand to train at a gym that is also in Chiang Mai came by Lanna to train with us. After a full session including sparring he started talking about how he expected to

This piece flowed out of my experiences that led to writing The Fragility of Western Masculinity, and responses to this post lead to me writing Endurance is a Skill. Read All My Articles on Overtraining Preface – I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long while and two things happened recently that have allowed me to finally pull it together. The first thing was writing to Lewis Pugh, who is an incredible athlete and ocean advocate who swims in extreme conditions in order to draw attention to the effects of climate change on the earth’s oceans. (Picture swimming

File this under The Culture of Muay. If you are to understand Muay Thai, I mean really understand it and see how it grew out of Thai society, and the forces that sustain and feed it today, you have to appreciate Fight Culture. It is not just the techniques and gyms that make up Muay Thai in Thailand, but rather a whole system of beliefs and experiences the pull together the karma and excitements of gambling – gambling on contests of body and soul. Part 1 on the Battle Beetles of the North is here: Muay Thai Clinch is Not

I learned a ton training with Sakmongkol in Pattaya for 7 weeks, as well in my time at Petchrungruang Gym. You can see my daily blog posts of my time with Sakmongkol here if you want to dig into the evolution of my lessons, the posts are pretty detailed with lots of video. Below are the lessons I learned, in particular the lessons or techniques I’m going to consciously work into my training at Lanna, now that I’m back in Chiang Mai. I’ll try to tell you why they were important for me and maybe they could help you, too.

Join and Study my Muay Thai Library of Legends This is a full video of a private I took with Arjan Surat, Head Coach of the Thai National Team, and owner of the esteemed (but lesser known to the west) Dejrat Gym in Bangkok. I did a short review of the gym when I interviewed female fighter Kaitlin Young, and it was then that I met Arjan Surat for the first time: an absolutely extraordinary teacher and life-force of Muay Thai. The man is Old School-Old School, telling me that he’s been holding pads longer than I’ve been alive (he’s

We all know the bro (or the female version) who says “Let’s go light” in sparring, and then whacks you. Or, when you get a hit in they suddenly step it up two notches in a way that seems inordinately ego-driven, like they’re trying to “win” at sparring. What’s up with these people? Don’t they know how to spar? It turns out that although there indeed may be all kinds of psychological reasons why people just hit back harder than they are hit – not understanding their own size, or just being a jerk – there also may be a

Surfing the Chaos I’ve known Emma for a few years now. We actually met through online communication and I forget that we didn’t actually meet each other in person until a little over a year ago. I really like Emma and recently I was scrolling through a feed of our private messages on Facebook in order to show something she’d sent me to my Thai friend and my friend remarked, “wow, you write so much! It’s like a book!” Yeah, we talk a lot. Which made me realize with surprise that I’ve not yet interviewed Emma. I’ve certainly thought to

[Update May 2015: Here is my account of the Backward Facing Tigers I received next] above video: my thoughts on just coming out from the 2 hrs of tattooing my sak yant. As one can see, I was significantly affected by the experience, but was in good spirits. It is a lot to digest. What This Sak Yant Meant to Me People may not realize it from the fact that I post online and blog, and even sometimes write about very personal things, but I’m an extremely private person. And even though I have probably put more out there about

Any westerner fighting in Thailand has an interest in portraying their Thai opponents as being the best and fighting at the top of their capabilities. And, to be fair, we assume and hope that this is true in our own minds. We come here to train hard and fight hard, and from our understanding of fighting in the west we assume quite fairly that our opponents are doing the same. But in Thailand, things are very often not what they seem; perhaps especially when gazing with western expectations. My experience of fighting in Thailand started over 5 years ago now

In the world of athletics and motivational memes, the word “sacrifice” gets thrown around a lot. All the things that one must sacrifice in the name of greatness, the hardships of waking up to train, missing out on nights of drinking with friends… whatever. I know people use this word without truly dissecting the concept, it’s just part of sport-speak. But I don’t use this word because it means a lot to me. When I think of the word “sacrifice” I think of giving up something of immense value – sacrifice is painful, not unfortunate or just hard. Abraham willing

Sylvie’s Tips – Muay Thai Techniques

above, my short Sylvie’s Tips on how I’m practicing Long Guard on the bag lately Everything little thing we do on the bag is repetition, even unconscious things can be “trained” into you. Simply taking a time out and walking back from the bag to reset during your rounds is that kind of small element. The further I get in my Muay Thai journey, the more I’m examining my bagwork (and shadow) for unconscious elements that I’m accidentally, or even non-efficiently training. It’s about awareness, so that I can figure out how to get my training into the ring with me

Just a little bagwork drill/game that I ran into in the gym by one of my favorite young fighters, Jatukam. Jatukam is 14 or 15 years old and just crushes his competition at Lumpinee and Rajadamnern. He’s one of the best fighters at 40 kg (88 lbs) and has a really clever, muay femur style, which is the tricky and evasive style mostly associated in the west with Saenchai. He’s Southpaw and has a nasty teep, but that doesn’t stop him from getting in close and smashing my face with solid left crosses when we spar. He’ll smile the

The Sylvie’s Tips feature is a collection of techniques and tips I’ve picked up in my time in Thailand, from some of the best trainers in the world. I’ve never seen these exact counters before, and they come from the greatest knee fighter in history, Dieselnoi, during my filming of a nakmuaynation.com private. You can read about that private here. Unique Knee Counter to Round Kick I’ve actually been on the receiving end of this knee to the hamstring a number of times, but only from my trainer, Pi Nu, during padwork. He thinks it’s hilarious and usually calls out boran!

Sylvie’s Tips: The Floating Block Sakmongkol was the first person to tell me not to turn around on kicks. He was adamant about it. It’s very awkward when you first try and your kick can be really flicky and horrible, but the more you get it under control the more you realize how much this increases power. Basically you want to have confidence that you can control your kick at any time, so if you miss your target you’re not going to spin all the way around. Honestly, you’ll seldom if ever see this in a Thai fight and when

n Sylvie’s Tips I try to capture on video various small techniques that I run into while training. The way that it happens in Thailand, things are seldom taught to you in the form of formal instruction, rather they come up suddenly in training and then are gone. I’m pretty shy, so it’s hard actually go around and request these things; I don’t want to stop everyone and have them repeat things for the camera. In this case though we arrived at O. Meekhun gym to find organized instruction being given to Phetjee Jaa and one of the boys named

a cross position and slash motion on the arm swing The Muay Thai Kick Arm Swing Angle One of the things you learn when you come to Thailand longer term is that there are many, many ways of doing something. You may have learned that there is “one” way, or been corrected away from a “wrong” way, and this is not necessarily a bad thing, but technique in Thailand is developed somewhat individually, over a long period of time, influenced by different styles and elements from trainers. It is not uncommon to be corrected in different directions by different trainers,

The real instruction doesn’t come until minute 1:40 but the thought to record Bai jumping in to practice knees with the boys was simply because it was pretty cute. Then her dad came over to correct her form (she was imitating the boys, mostly one who is a few down in the row). Bai is 9 years old and has a few fights; this drill is something all the kids do at the start of training as a warmup and conditioning drill. I’m pretty sure they do a thousand repetitions. As Bai first starts out, her father Goh (who is

I’ve never really had opponents catching my kicks in fights, but that’s partially because I don’t really mid-kick. So, the reason I know that I suck at responding when my kick is caught is almost entirely through padwork, where I topple over like a kicked-over bicycle. Which is to say that I don’t really practice against this and only get reminded of how unpracticed I am when my trainer occasionally wants to mess with me. I do know how to handle the caught kick – I’ve been shown techniques from various sources – but I never drill them. When I visited

Below is a long technique vlog, basically explaining an adjustment I’ve made to my training in the last couple of weeks. Usually my training consists of things that promote my conditioning and lots of work focused on specific techniques that I want to develop. These can be techniques or tactics I’ve picked up from legends while filming my Muay Thai Library project, or things I already do that I think I should sharpen up for my particular fighting style. I’m always working on something and it’s always hard, always with the aim of development. As with all training regimes, repetition is

How to Crush the Head and Neck Kru Nu’s son Bank has a terribly strong squeeze in the clinch, and ends up just crushing me most of the time when we practice. He just turned 14 and earlier this year began his Lumpinee career. So today I asked him to show me the hand position he uses, and learned that all this time I’ve been doing it backwards, leveraging with the wrong arm, and wrongly using the face of my wrist instead of the blade of my forearm. You are basically crushing the opponent’s forehead into your own shoulder, with

We got a question on the Muay Thai Roundtable forum the other day that I reckon is a pretty common issue. When I first started taking Muay Thai from Master K, he described the teep as the “electric fence” around every other technique. Teep comes first, basically – the first line of defense and keeping your opponent out of your space until you want them there. And I sucked at teeping for a really long time. It’s only fairly recently, in the last 1.5 years maybe, that my teep has become a favorite technique, and it didn’t become that way because

Making Your Elbows (Hooks & Crosses) Fast, Direct and Accurate This is a pretty simple technique and you can find a wall anywhere, so we can mark this down as one of the most accessible tools there is. Basically, I have been alerted to the folly of how my arms launch away from my body when I throw strikes, which is detrimental to both power and control. Sagat is the one who really explained trajectory to me [<<watch that session to see what this philosophy of strking is about], showing how a wind-up is just wasted space, energy and time,

This is a deceptively simple way to close distance. I get interesting communication from readers and fans. When it’s brief, I’ll answer directly. Mostly I try to get folks to post their questions on the Muay Thai Roundtable forum so it can help others who might have the same questions and more people can chime in to help with answers; but in this case the question was one I’ve not only worked hard to develop a strategy on, as a smaller fighter, but it’s also one that I’ve heard a few times. So it makes sense to do a Sylvie’s

Some of My Best Posts

I’ve written before about how Muay Thai and fighting, to me, isn’t “violence.” My argument was that I have experienced real violence, the above is the story of my rape as a child, and that the consent and preparation involved in fighting isn’t the same. There is, however, a flavor of violence in Muay Thai – it is, as my old boxing coach Ray Valez would say, “the hurt business” and ultimately any fighter pushing for the highest form of the art of Muay Thai has to embrace this. Yesterday there was a young woman at my gym, Petchrungruang, who

I just had to do my annual visa run, which requires sitting in a van full of total strangers for the 11 hour drive up to the border with Laos, an overnight stay, then the 11 hour drive back down to Pattaya. It’s grueling. Sitting in a car or a plane for this number of hours takes a toll on anyone. It’s astonishing how tired sitting on your ass makes you. I’m not very social, so I always put as many hours of podcasts and audio books as possible on my player so I can leave my headphones in the

Apologies to my younger readers, this post is laced with profanity. Sometimes profanity has a special power to describe things in ways other words can’t. The plastic stool underneath me is too far out from the actual corner and my body kind of tips backwards as my cornermen lift my legs into their hands and rub icy cold water on my thighs and shins. I try to balance myself on the ropes but it’s more awkward and I reposition my forearms to the tops of my thighs; the cold water is going over my head now, which feels nice because

This article is about the flourishing Muay Thai of Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, becoming the best female fight city in the country and very possibly in the entire world. No other city boasts such a complete native female Thai fight scene: it’s fed by side-bet (gambling) fights in the outlying provinces, stabilized by Sports Schools, hosted at a large number of local stadia (all of which allow women to fight in them) which hold fights every night of the week, and supported by the Thai Muay Siam media coverage. If you are a female Muay Thai fighter, this

Stephan Fox is the General Secretary of the International Federation of Muaythai Amateur (IFMA) and the Vice-President of the World Muaythai Council (WMC). He is a huge figure in the recognition and development of amateur Muaythai in Thailand, as well as international competition with both the IFMA and WMC. After 20 years of work, the International Olympic Committee has just given provisional recognition for possible inclusion in the Olympics – let me repeat that: 20 years of work for that, and Mr. Fox’s response is, “right on schedule.” above, the full 30 minute interview with Stephan Fox We cover a range of

What follows is not authoritative, it is just the things I’ve gleaned in my nearly 5 years of full time training at my various gyms, and in traveling around and taking privates from some of the best in Thailand. You can get access to my growing Muay Thai library with legends for a suggested pledge of $5. I read a rant on Reddit that, despite its intense language, does open up that some people do get frustrated training in Thailand, finding a lack of instruction and padwork that be repetitive. I do believe there is no better place in the

Alex and Note are standing on opposite corners of the ring, wearing shinguards and gloves, hanging out like they’re about to do anything other than sparring. They’re totally relaxed, laughing, joking. Kru Nu is pacing around and there’s a buzz around the circumference of the ring while the remainder of the boys all takes their positions along the ropes as spectators and Goh – one of the padmen for the kids – is hollering for Chicken Man. Kru Nu squats down with his hands on the top rope, peering under the staircase and out into the chicken farm, the most likely

First off, let me say it: weight, its not that big of a deal. There is a strong caveat to this, which is that it is a definite advantage, but so is height, or knowing the scoring system, or fighting since you were 10, or having a fight on your home turf, and so many other things. So while weight is always a potential advantage, it is just one among many possible advantages. You can beat people who have the weight advantage over you, just like you can with any of those other advantages. I know that in the West

read my guest post articles a Husband’s Point of View A Husband’s Point of View – Consider this a working theory. I’ve written about the uniqueness of Thai style training before, in The Slow Cook vs the Hack, and this article can be seen as something of an extension of that. But as Sylvie’s husband watching her progress through very earnest training and a hell of a lot of fighting, and seeing numerous westerners come through her Thai gyms, I’ve come upon something I think is pretty important. What led me to this is a very particular quality many serious

Below is meant to be a helpful guide, something that I wish I had when I first came to training Thailand. These are just things I’ve noticed in my 4 years of training and fighting here and are not hard and fast rules to follow. If you want to be polite in Thailand gyms, in a culture that is different than your own, these are just a few things to look for. There are of course a wide variety of gym experiences in Thailand, and things that are impolite in a small, family Thai-style gym might very well be common

A lot of us feel that aggression comes with an “on/off” switch, and that we should be able to flick it back and forth based on context. Many of us who are learning Muay Thai struggle with aggression, perhaps because we don’t feel that we are “naturally aggressive,” and it’s frustrating to watch those who are seemingly naturally gifted with aggression succeed in ways that we don’t see in ourselves. But aggression isn’t natural, even if it does seem innate in some more than others. I contend that aggression feels natural to some due to having spent years cultivating it before they

First a Little Bit About Daeng Daeng is one of the most fight-focused trainers I’ve trained with. When I was training at Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, it was Daeng who invested the most in diagnosing and fixing weaknesses in my fighting. He wasn’t my main trainer, but he’s a very good teacher and has a keen eye for finding how to improve on existing strengths and correct errors. I’d initially gotten a bit stuck with a technically brilliant but lazy and unmotivated trainer – that guy was a great trainer for some, just not for me – and Daeng

Join and Study my Muay Thai Library of Legends This is a full video of a private I took with Arjan Surat, Head Coach of the Thai National Team, and owner of the esteemed (but lesser known to the west) Dejrat Gym in Bangkok. I did a short review of the gym when I interviewed female fighter Kaitlin Young, and it was then that I met Arjan Surat for the first time: an absolutely extraordinary teacher and life-force of Muay Thai. The man is Old School-Old School, telling me that he’s been holding pads longer than I’ve been alive (he’s

The Gendered Experience

Where is the Chiang Mai University Library? When I first arrived in Chiang Mai, for whatever reason – maybe it was the language barrier as I had not yet progressed with my Thai, or maybe it was a mismatch between my Googling skills and everything not being available on an English search engine – but I could not figure out where exactly the Chiang Mai University Library was, despite the fact I live only a 15 minutes walk from CMU. I really wanted to locate the library because there were several gender studies books that I wanted to delve into

Surfing the Chaos I’ve known Emma for a few years now. We actually met through online communication and I forget that we didn’t actually meet each other in person until a little over a year ago. I really like Emma and recently I was scrolling through a feed of our private messages on Facebook in order to show something she’d sent me to my Thai friend and my friend remarked, “wow, you write so much! It’s like a book!” Yeah, we talk a lot. Which made me realize with surprise that I’ve not yet interviewed Emma. I’ve certainly thought to

The Way She Walked Liz Carmouche came out first and the announcer stated that she would be the first woman to enter the octagon – ever, as “the octagon” is a trademarked title for the UFC cage – and I started crying right there. To me there is something really beautiful about the fact that any woman fighter who is being heralded as the first whatever because it necessarily means there is another woman involved. Want to be the first woman to fight in the UFC? We’ll then you’re automatically bringing a second woman with you. It’s amazing. So Carmouche

I wrote this post a few years ago, probably in the first year that I was training and fighting out of Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai. At the time there were a lot of cultural differences from the west, that are perhaps more emphasized in the conservative North, that were eye-opening to me. The superstition and downright fear of women’s undergarments was a big one, which is illustrated by this story I’ve called “the panty incident.” Enjoy. A few days ago I noticed a rogue sport-top bra (style, not really supportive) hanging on a drying rack at the gym.

Ladies, Send in Your Bloodied Face Fighter Photos This is a call for female fighters to send me photos of their own bloodied face, to join a wall of women who have had their faces bloodied in fights. This is really in answer to the absence of the bloodied female face in fight media, something which actively works to segregate women, aesthetically, as something less than “real” fighters. The bloodied male face is celebrated in media; it symbolizes male toughness, aggression, commitment. But to a large degree the female fighter face has been whitewashed in a sea of beauty shots

*** A quick note on how these days are numbered: I go by only counting actual days of training with Sakmongkol, so I’ve been in Pattaya longer than 26 days and these two days actually have a day of rest between them. Day 25 – Back to Training with Mong On Saturday I finally got Sakmongkol to agree to hold pads for me after nearly a week of not training our extra hour and a few days of him not holding pads for me at all. We both got sick and I took Wednesday off to recover, when I came

This is a photo of Nam, the wonderful girl I wrote about in Expect the Unexpected two weeks ago. I went to the gym this afternoon (Sunday, “off day”) for some light training in the afternoon and about 20 minutes in a car pulled up. I’d hoped Nam and her sister would be there training again and when the girls spilled out of the car Nam gave me this very excited wave and smiled, saying in English sing-song voice, “Hello!” I asked her how she was and she had to calm down real quick before delivering a perfectly rehearsed, “I’m

I write a lot about how having a female body and female identity in a male-dominated sport and alien culture places limits on my possibilities as a fighter. There are also ways in which my anatomical build and a general physiognomy work to my advantage, (I use the word “physiognomy” throughout because none fit better, despite it not being exact): Namely, the ways in which my body isn’t stereotypically feminine create some new possibilities of perception and opportunity, not just drawbacks. I have just written about status and how near invisible behaviors, can affect it: The Mitt And the Joke. This

I got the gym a little after 4:00 this afternoon. It had rained heavily for almost an hour and the air was only recently cleared of the heaving movement of wind. Nook was directing two young western men in wrapping their hands and we chatted in broken Thai through different sides of the ring, asking each other whether or not another female fighter from the gym had won her bout the night before. Neither of us had attended the fight and, from what I could understand of Nook’s account of a 20 lbs chicken, he’d probably gone to a cock

You can watch my video interview with Angie here. I’m watching Angie smash the pads with Pi Nu. She becomes very still when he tags her legs with kicks – they don’t look hard from here, and they’re definitely not full power, but I’ve been on the receiving end of them and they fucking hurt – but she stays strong. She pauses after the strike, the expression on her face becomes hardened and she comes back with a full-power strike and a grunt, almost a growl, in return. She’s preparing for a fight and she’s serious. Her last fight was

There is a natural division in western feminist thinking, and in some way this post is about that divide. But much more it is about the situational ethics, the principles we may want to protect and forward, when visiting or even living in a traditional culture like Thailand; when coming to a different culture as a western privileged woman. This post is a single-person deliberation about how to best do so in the context of Muay Thai and its unique traditions in Thailand, how I am attempting to do so. Hopefully this resonates with others. Not all women from the

OPPRESSED MAJORITY (Majorité Opprimée English), by Eleonore Pourriat I just watched this short movie (10 min) on YouTube, in which the everyday sexism against women is expressed through a reversal in which men are the “oppressed majority.” I write about gender a lot and I suspect a lot of men have a hard time appreciating on a deep level what women experience on a daily basis, mostly because men simply don’t ever experience it. And I do mean on a daily basis – while this movie includes a sexual assault that is not in the day-to-day life of every individual